What is in the best interests of a child, and could that ever include interventions that we might regard as prima facie detrimental to a child’s physical well-being? This question is raised a fortiori by growth attenuation treatments in children with severe neurological disorders causing extreme developmental delay. I argue that two principles that provide guidance in generating a conception of best interests for each individual child yield the right results in such cases. The principles are as follows: the potentiality principle, whereby every child should be able to develop its potential and is entitled to receive certain help in doing so, and the principle of psychosomatic harmony, whereby every human being is entitled to treatment that is appropriate to or enables a life in which mind and body are in tune with each other. These principles indicate a certain response to what we can call Ashley-type cases and admit certain caveats.

Separation of craniopagus twins is fraught by ethical issues. The surgery is high risk and may involve the sacrifice of one twin. We review surgical successes in separation of craniopagus twins and consider ethical and legal concepts affecting the decision to undertake such procedures. Our discussion considers how Gillett’s potentiality principle and the concept of moral permissibility may be used to arrive at fair and realistic decisions.

Use of the best-interests test as the legal standard to justify medical treatment (or its cessation) in respect to legally incompetent adults or minors has come under sustained critique over the years. “Best interests” has variously been alleged to be indeterminate as well as susceptible to majoritarian ideology and inherent bias. It has also been alleged to be inferior to rights-based approaches. Against the background of several particularly hard cases involving minors discussed by Gillett in a prior article in this journal, this article considers some of these critiques. It concludes that these critical accounts make significant contributions to enabling a more procedurally and substantively robust consideration of what might be in a child’s best interests. However, it is argued that none of these accounts alone provide a superior framework that would justify jettisoning the concept of best interests. Further, it is suggested that best interests still has an important role in achieving patient-centered decisionmaking in this context. It concludes by suggesting a taxonomy of considerations when determining best interests.

Managing a healthcare situation in accordance with the best interests of a child can be challenging for both parents and healthcare professionals. These challenges take different forms as the child grows and develops physically, emotionally, and cognitively. In this article I argue that a child’s best interests cannot be construed in terms of a narrow conception of human beings as isolated, self-contained biological organisms, in which “health” and “illness” are understood in terms of physiological function and dysfunction. Such an approach overlooks the wider context in which the child grows into and comes to dwell in the world, continually enacting her life within her community. The health of a child is intimately connected to the ways in which she is involved in the world, through active and rewarding engagement with significant others. That embeddedness implies that acting in her best interests calls for others to nurture and integrate her into a sustainable human community so that she is supported appropriately throughout all the contingencies and vagaries of life that impact on her health.

The “Ashley treatment” has provoked much debate and remains ethically controversial. Given that more children are being referred for such treatment, there remains a need to provide advice to clinicians and ethics committees regarding how to respond to such requests. This article contends that there is one particularly important gap in the existing literature about growth attenuation therapy (GAT) (one aspect of the Ashley treatment): the views of parents of children with profound cognitive impairment (PCI) remain significantly underrepresented. The article attempts to redress this balance by analyzing published accounts both from parents of children who have received GAT and from parents who oppose treatment. Using these accounts, important points are illuminated regarding how parents characterize benefits and harms, and their responsibilities as surrogate decisionmakers. This analysis could contribute to decisionmaking about future requests for GAT and might also have wider relevance to healthcare decisionmaking for children with PCI.

Severe congenital hydrocephalus manifests as accumulation of a large amount of excess fluid in the brain. It is a paradigmatic example of a condition in which diagnosis is relatively straightforward and long-term survival is usually associated with severe disability. It might be thought that, should parents agree, palliative care and limitation of treatment would be clearly permissible on the basis of the best interests of the infant. However, severe congenital hydrocephalus illustrates some of the neuroethical challenges in pediatrics. The permissibility of withholding or withdrawing treatment is limited by uncertainty in prognosis and the possibility of “palliative harm.” Conversely, although there are some situations in which treatment is contrary to the interests of the child, or unreasonable on the grounds of limited resources, acute surgical treatment of hydrocephalus rarely falls into that category.

Most theories of parenthood assume, at least implicitly, that a child will grow up to be an independent, autonomous adult. However, some children with cognitive limitations or psychiatric illness are unable to do so. For this reason, these accounts do not accommodate the circumstances and responsibilities of parents of such adult children. Our article attempts to correct this deficiency. In particular, we describe some of the common characteristics and experiences of this population of parents and children, examine the unique aspects of their relationships, review several philosophical accounts of parental obligations, consider how these accounts might be extrapolated to semiautonomous adult children, and provide suggestions about parental obligations to promote autonomy and independence in adult children with cognitive limitations or psychiatric illness. In extending accounts of parental responsibilities to the case of semiautonomous adults, we find that the parental role includes the duty to continue to provide care—indefinitely if necessary—while cultivating autonomy and independence.

This article is intended to highlight the unique vulnerability associated with a severe medical illness. It outlines important considerations that are relevant to patients but perhaps especially relevant to medical providers. There are many factors that contribute to recovery from a life-threatening illness. Essential, but underestimated, factors include (1) a vision for what the meaning of your life can be; (2) simple and unexpected acts of kindness that underscore the commitment of your providers to your well-being; and (3) the character of providers and the culture of the institution, which vary tremendously and are palpable to the patient.

An integrated and principled neuroethics offers ethical guidelines able to transcend conventional and medical reliance on normality standards. Elsewhere we have proposed four principles for wise guidance on human transformations. Principles like these are already urgently needed, as bio- and cyberenhancements are rapidly emerging. Context matters. Neither “treatments” nor “enhancements” are objectively identifiable apart from performance expectations, social contexts, and civic orders. Lessons learned from disability studies about enablement and inclusion suggest a fresh way to categorize modifications to the body and its performance. The term “enhancement” should be broken apart to permit recognition of enablements and augmentations, and kinds of radical augmentation for specialized performance. Augmentations affecting the self, self-worth, and self-identity of persons require heightened ethical scrutiny. Reversibility becomes the core problem, not the easy answer, as augmented persons may not cooperate with either decommissioning or displacement into unaccommodating societies. We conclude by indicating how our four principles of self-creativity, nonobsolescence, empowerment, and citizenship establish a neuroethics beyond normal that is better prepared for a future in which humans and their societies are going so far beyond normal.

Although ethics is an essential component of undergraduate medical education, research suggests that current medical ethics curricula face considerable challenges in improving students’ ethical reasoning. This article discusses these challenges and introduces a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised: the Medical Ethics Bowl (MEB). Finally, we suggest the pedagogical advantages of the MEB when compared to other ethics curricula.